


only fools rush in

by bittereternity



Category: House M.D.
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-06 23:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittereternity/pseuds/bittereternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>so take my hand, and take my whole life too. </i>Or, the one in which Wilson realizes he's in love. It kind of throws him off-kilter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	only fools rush in

**Author's Note:**

> high levels of shmoop and fluff, if that constitutes a warning? No specific spoilers for the series.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

\- Pablo Neruda, _100 Love Sonnets_

*

An hour before it’s strictly lunchtime, House unceremoniously slams his office door wide open.

“Every time I think that my team is reasonably functional,” he says, sitting down opposite Wilson and propping his feet on the table, “they go and do something that makes me certain that they have a collective IQ of under 80.”

Wilson doesn't look up from his paperwork. “House,” he warns, “play nice with them or mommy will take your toys away.”

House makes a noise of something akin to discontent and shifts in his chair. He glances over and takes in the height of the pile of consults on Wilson’s desk. He grabs the file on the top of the rapidly increasing pile and flips it open and skims through the contents.

“Terminal, “he announces dramatically, as if Wilson didn't know that already. When he doesn't reply, House lets out an exaggerated sigh. “No lunch today?”

“Sorry,” Wilson murmurs automatically without actually looking up from the file he’s reading.

House sighs again, louder this time, and Wilson finally looks up with a huff of irritation and a questioning glance. “Their chances of dying won’t _increase_ if you come for lunch with me,” House points out.

_“House,”_ Wilson’s tone is admonishing, firm. “There are too many consults that I have to get through today. Find someone else to pay your lunch money, alright?”

House gives a dramatic pout, but for once, he listens. He pulls his feet off the table and leaves as quietly as is possible for a man with a cane.

Wilson goes back to the next folder on his pile, and he’s so absorbed in adding his final comments that he doesn't hear him come back until there’s something being thrown at him.

He catches it out of reflex and sees a packet of chips. _Sour cream and onion,_ it says on the cover in bright letters.

“It was the last one in the vending machine,” House says almost defensively. Wilson just looks confused.

“It’s your _favorite,”_ he points it out, and stomps out as abruptly as he’d come in.

Wilson sits and stares at the packet for a few minutes. A part of his brain helpfully supplies that this could be a part of an elaborate prank to make him look utterly moronic, and that thought is strangely comforting, because that means he can chalk up the unexpected increase in his heartbeat to middle-age and cardiac complications.

Another part of his brain, however, helpfully supplies that it _is_ noon, and he could definitely use a snack. He tears off the packet and pops a few chips in his mouth, savoring the gradually spreading taste of onion and grease.

He can still feel his heart thumping inside his rib-cage in an abnormally _loud_ manner, and he rubs his hand over his chest a few times, trying to calm himself down, which is odd because he doesn't feel particularly rushed or excited in the first place.

“Damn chips,” he mutters, and goes back to work.

*

The first time, well:

“Not so fast,” Wilson announces loudly as he jogs to catch up with House in front of the elevators. “I need a consult."

House rubs his hands in glee. “Oh, _good,”_ he says in a voice that’s far too cheerful for a regular Tuesday afternoon. “That means I’ll have a legitimate excuse to skip clinic duty.”

Wilson looks at him. “You know,” House elaborates, “I can only use the whole _I have to go for a prostate exam_ thing only works a couple of times before people either start getting genuinely freaked out or genuinely worried.”

Wilson shakes his head. “Let’s just pretend I never heard that,” he says. “So, the consult. She’s my patient, stage three CML, and she only started chemotherapy last month, but the mini-seizures she’s been having for the last couple of days aren't a side-effect of her chemo dosage. I thought--”

“Yeah, yeah, just give me the chart,” House interrupts, and as he moves to take the chart out of Wilson’s outstretched hands, their fingers brush lightly for the fraction of a second.

Then the file is in House’s hands and for the tiniest period of time, Wilson takes notice of the way House’s fingers clasp around the file, the way he rubs his thumb unconsciously on the back of the file, the way his index finger trails on the bottom of the page and leaves a print, a mark, before he flips to the next page. It would be so easy, Wilson thinks, to just shift forward a _little_ bit and accidentally knock off the papers from House’s hands because it would give him the flimsiest of excuses to pick up the file and touch House’s hands again. He wonders how it would feel to have those incredibly long, calloused fingers on his own, how his hand, his body would react to the feel House’s thumb, how his own hands would feel clasped against House’s own. He finds himself thinking about the elegance to House’s each slight movement, the way his fingers almost seem to caress the words on the page in front of him, how his fingers are always elegant, always smooth against _anything_ , be it an X-ray film or a sheet of music, how House wields his hands around like they were _born_ to produce only the most beautiful, most poignant of music. And –

“Wilson,” House snaps, looking closely at him with a huff of irritation, “are you _listening?_ Isn't it enough that I’m doing this consult for you out of the pure goodness of my heart and with no ulterior motives whatsoever?”

“Oh,” he mumbles. “Yeah, yeah right.”

House looks at him suspiciously again, and Wilson tries to straighten up as inconspicuously as possible. Thankfully, House seems to let it go and stalks towards the conference room with the folder in hand and _I’ll come get you after I run some tests_ thrown over his back.

Wilson stands there and feels dizzy and disoriented as hospital personnel rush all around him, carrying medical supplies and saving lives. He feels the blood pounding in his ears, the rapid acceleration of his heartbeat and the warmth spreading through his body and thinks: _oh._

And then, because he’s just not the kind of guy who has life-changing epiphanies in the middle of the goddamn hospital, he thinks very romantically, poetically, appropriately: _fuck._

*

It occurs to him, the more he dwells on this matter of ever-increasing _feeling_ around House, that he has no one in his life to talk to that isn't  well, House. The thought saddens him just a little bit.

He tries to think of a way to discuss this with House and comes up empty. He thinks of employing the _my friend XYZ has a problem_ method, and if were any more masochistic than he already apparently is, he would bet with himself over the number of seconds it would take House to see through his façade.

After a particularly grueling hour of being unable to focus on _General Hospital_ for the incredibly simple reason that House’s hands were in the way, he decides to be a little proactive.

“I’m in love,” he announces in a grand gesture as he walks into Cuddy’s office and makes her snap up from her paperwork so fast he’s sure she’s broken her neck.

Cuddy sighs. “Which nurse do I need to replace this time?”

Wilson shakes his head. “It’s _House_ ,” he announces dramatically and flops down on the couch. “I think I’m in love with him.”

Cuddy relaxes and picks up her pen again. “I’m _serious_ ,” he repeats again, and almost pokes Cuddy with a pen.

“ _Wilson,”_ Cuddy lets out a weary sigh. “This is really not as new or earth-shattering as you would have me believe.”

Wilson stares at her. “What, now?”

Cuddy looks at him like he’s grown a second appendage out of his nose. “Everyone _knows_ that already,” she says, enunciating her words slowly like he’s particularly slow.

“What?” his voice rises an octave or two. “But I just figured it out last week.”

Cuddy lets out another one of her world-weary sighs, and he pointedly doesn’t ogle at the way her half-exposed breasts heave up and down.

“Oh, _Wilson_ ,” she sighs.

He resists the temptation to stomp out of her office.

*

It scares him sometimes, the intensity of this crushing _feeling_ he’s capable of for another person. He thinks of the times he’d been in love before; in the dark of his own apartment and surrounded by too many empty bottles of alcohol, he thinks of what he had felt for Sam, Bonnie, Julie, for every other person who had smiled at him and made him smile in return.

He can think of the same warning signs: heart beating faster, the sudden inability to keep his eyes off them, and the urge, so primal, so foreign and yet so familiar to take them in his arms and kiss them senseless. His love had always been a fire, even later, even after life and work and failed relationships had disillusioned him about any conceivable future. His love had always been a fire, always devouring and consuming and warming until, until one day he had burned everything surrounding him, only leaving a string of apologies and farewells.

He has moments of hope, moments where he thinks the whole _feeling_ thing with him and House can actually work out, and it is always followed by moments of crushing fear because he doesn't want to burn House down at all because that would be a surefire way of destroying himself, and he feels terrified with the potential implication of his realization that he is, indeed, capable of loving _House._

*

“So, I heard through the hospital grapevine about your little…predicament,” Foreman says without preamble, walking into his office like he _belongs_ there.

Wilson sighs. “Of course you did.”

“Look,” Foreman says, raising his arms slightly in mock-surrender. “All I’m saying is that you have to be a little careful with House. He could be a little stubborn in the beginning, you know, like a particularly stubborn tap. You have to open it slowly, inch by inch, and at first the water only comes in a few drops, and then suddenly the tap is open wide enough and you have a perfect gush of running water. House won’t… let you in at first, but little by little, he will give all of himself to you and if you ever turn back, he won’t have anything left.”

Foreman finishes with a deep breath and Wilson blinks. For good measure, he blinks again. “Wait,” he says, finally finding his voice, “are you protecting _him_ against _me?_ ”

Foreman looks discomfited. “He’s an acceptable boss, sometimes,” he says defensively. Wilson thinks it’s a little sweet that he is looking out for his boss in his own twisted way.

“Either way,” he says, “there’s nothing _to_ protect him from. He doesn’t… reciprocate.”

Foreman stares. “He actually, _voluntarily_ talks to you every _hour_ of the day without insulting your mother, your ethnicity or your religion,” he finally states, with a tone that makes Wilson feel incredibly stupid.

Wilson considers this. “He insults my hair every day,” he says doubtfully.

Foreman’s lips twitch just the slightest bit. On anyone else, Wilson would've called it a smile. “It’s not the same,” he says, and leaves the same way he had entered.

*

Wilson is stretched out on House’s couch, half-empty pizza boxes and cans of beer strewn across the coffee table, when everything comes to an abrupt halt.

He vaguely watched the movie credits rolling on the TV, and when House returns from a bathroom break, he takes a deep breath and thinks, _now or never._

House sits down next to him and shuffles through the DVDs he’d brought over that evening. As he picks up one with a digitally enhanced blonde girl on the cover, he sets down the can of beer on the table and quietly, carefully says, “I love you.”

House stops. If this were another situation, he would have silently rejoiced at the notion of rendering House catatonic just for a second.

“I thought you should know that,” he continues, and shuts off the small part of his brain that’s screaming at him to stop making an ass out of himself. “I don’t mean it in just a drunk and manly sense, although I love you like that, too.” He clears his throat, thinks back over what he’s said and confuses himself in the process.

“What I mean is that,” he continues, “I have this _feeling_ all the time and I’m pretty, almost sure that it’s because I love you. I just thought I should let you now because, well, you are directly involved in it.

“And don’t worry,” he hastens to add, “it’s not going to become a _thing_. It’s just something I’m dealing with and I thought the polite thing to do would be to tell you. You know, in the spirit of friendship and all?” he finishes weakly, and forces out a laugh that feels foreign even to his own ears.

When he finally looks at House, House is staring at him, scrutinizing him closely like he’s a particularly interesting disease or a micro-organism stuck in the confines of a cover slip on a microscopic slide.

“Well, that…rules out porn for the next movie,” House finally states.

Wilson has to agree.

*

The next day, he’s stuck in a budget meeting until three in the afternoon and he returns to find House sitting in his chair and swinging his cane.

He falters, unsure of what to say next. House, however, solves his problems.

“You have three ex-wives,” he says. Wilson blinks at the segue, and resorts to nodding carefully.

“You loved them,” House points out, and suddenly Wilson has a better understanding of Cuddy in her office with her world-weary sighs.

“I know that,” he says carefully and slides into a chair. House looks at him like he’s expected to continue.

“I’ve only ever had one of you,” he finally mumbles, and simultaneously like he’s said too little and too much and it takes a great deal of effort to not blush or revert to being his exaggerated version of a twelve-year old schoolgirl.

But House is staring at him like he’s a complicated mathematical equation that he can’t _quite_ figure out and he feels a rush of affecting surge through him, and any doubts over the verity of what he’s just said is instantly wiped clean.

“Only the one,” he repeats, louder this time. House doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t tease him either, so Wilson takes a win when he can.

*

It comes to him suddenly and most unceremoniously, in the middle of delivering very bad news to his very young patient:

Loving House has never been about the fire or the passion or the need, the urge to consume everything about him. Loving House has been a lot simpler, a lot calmer; it has simply always been there, been a part of his identity. House doesn’t make him want to go off on an impulse and buy an expensive ring, or take a cruise around half the world just for the purpose of shouting out his joy. Loving House grounds him, makes him want to be simply better for _himself_ without wanting to be anything else for anyone else. Loving House isn’t about finding new things, its about rediscovering what has always been there, been around.

Loving House is calm, simple, unexceptional, involuntary. Loving House is synonymous with breathing, digesting, subsisting.

Loving House, he realizes in a rush of breath that makes him sway on his feet, is an imperative piece in the thousand-piece puzzle of his existence.

*

He’s packing for a three-week oncology seminar series in Seattle when House barges in through the door.

“You’re leaving for three weeks,” House states. Wilson raises his eyebrows in a silent _yeah, I was the one who told you that._

“But who will _feed_ me?” House whines, and he rolls his eyes. He goes into his bedroom to retrieve some of his ties while House helps himself to a beer from his refrigerator and watches him pack impassively from the living room.

“Make sure you at least lock the door on the way out this time,” he says, zipping his suitcase up on his coffee table.

House shrugs and stands up. “I’ll walk out with you,” he says, grabbing his cane.

“Alright, House,” he says finally, sliding into the driver’s seat and putting the key into the ignition. “I’ll see you in three weeks. Try not to overdose or lie in a pool of your own vomit.” He frowns and adds, “And don’t try to provoke someone to murder you, okay?” It’s not really as funny as he makes it out to be, and the words stick in his throat as he forces them out against the lump of something _unfamiliar_ rising in his throat. House rolls his eyes and taps his cane on the sidewalk, and he figures this is the best acknowledgement he is going to get. He opens his mouth to say something, and against better judgment he purses his lips and ignores the bitter aftertaste in his mouth.

He has almost backed out of the garage when he hears the tip of House’s cane rattle lightly against his window. He brakes abruptly and allows House to open the passenger door and climb in.

“If you think I’m going to give over my wallet,” he mutters, voice firm, as soon as House is inside, “you’re really really wrong.”

House sighs. “Wilson, will you just _stop talking?_ ” he finally snaps, and the irritation and utter frustration lacing his voice is only half-successful in masking a sense of urgency.

It is only the utter surprise at House’s tone that makes him snap his mouth shut.

“Just,” House starts irritably, and then lets out a harsh breath. His shoulders visibly sag, and he clenches and unclenches his fist a few times before losing a mental battle to his hand and resting it on his knees.

“Just,” he begins again, a little more calm infused in his voice, “be careful, alright? Yes, I know _I know_ , the fate of the flight is pretty much out of our control unless you’re a pilot or some sort of a crazy intelligent aerospace engineer but at least _try_ to listen to the pretty stewards. You never know, they might even be hot enough to hold your attention for more than three minutes. And when you land, I know you’re going to be Mr. Perfectionist and edit every single little word on your speech a thousand times, but at least grab a salad or something. And you…” he trails off at the expression on Wilson’s face and frowns.

Wilson sits there and listens to House’s rapidly impassioned speech about a mundane _flight -_ and on any other man, this would be called rambling, but House doesn’t ramble, oh no sir – and feels a strange lightness in his chest, like a load has been lifted off his shoulders, like someone has unchained him and set him free into the world. His face widens into a smile before he can help it, until his cheeks hurt and his eyes are so narrowed into slits that he can barely _see_ ahead. But he looks at House, and keeps looking at House as he fumbles, actually searches for his words, and for a moment  there’s only the two of them in this moment and everything else – death and pain and _life_ \- is far behind and feels simultaneously all-powerful and humbled. House keeps talking and he tries to reel this moment in, memorize every single little minute details, and _god,_ if he could, he would remember the latitude and the longitude of this location, the very fraction of every second of this conversation. If he could, he would reach forward and cover House’s hand with his, and he would lean forward and tilt his face towards his own, and if he could, if he could –

And then, it hits him like a ton of bricks, occurs to him in a moment of unsettling clarity that he _can._

And he does.

He leans forward and House looks at him and trails off at the look on his face. House’s face begins to contort in a familiar frowning stance but he reaches to tilt his face towards his own. He strokes the corner of House’s lips with the pad of his thumb, and keeps his eyes trained on House’s face and finds there all the symptoms he’s always wanted to see: the dilation of his pupils, the very, very hints of color rising at the highest points of his cheekbones, the very slight crinkling of his eyes, the harshness of his breath and the increasing frequency of his inhalation. He rubs his thumb against the coarse skin on the underside of House’s lips, and in response, feels House’s hand on the back of his neck, on the side of his face, tangled in his hair.

House leans forward too, and then all of a sudden, they are _this_ close, so close that he can individually count every single crack on House’s lower lip, and he smiles against House’s face. “It’s alright, House,” he mumbles, almost incoherent, almost delirious with adrenaline, with the force of his _feeling_ guiding his actions, “I love you, too.”

In response, House’s grip in his hair tightens almost imperceptibly, and it gives him the last of the boost he needs to close the distance between their lips. House’s lips are dry and his breath smells like an odd combination of beer and friend onions, but it doesn’t matter at all because House’s lips are on his and House’s hands are tangled somewhere between his hair and he is constantly shifting, ever moving around himself to try to bring, to allow Wilson _in._

As they break for air, still mere millimeters apart, House opens his eyes and look at him, and in that moment, his eyes are incredibly blue and half-terrified and unabashedly vulnerable and in his eyes, Wilson can feel everything going through House’s incredibly terrifying mind; in his eyes, Wilson can see everything laid bare just for _him,_ in his eyes, Wilson can read everything House can’t yet bring himself to say: _yes. yes. yes._

_*_


End file.
